Ballpark Raising Railings - And Concerns About Safety

The builders of the new Seattle Mariner stadium plan to raise front-row railings 4 inches, trading their own uneasiness about the railing's low height with the possibility of obstructing some fans' views.

The new height will be 30 inches, about a half-foot more than the length of this newspaper.

For stadium designers, that's flirting with getting in a spectator's way.

"If you have rails too high, it's difficult for people to see the field from the first few rows," said Kathy Johnson, spokeswoman for the Public Facilities District (PFD), the agency in charge of building Safeco Field.

But to safety experts, a 30-inch railing is still flirting with a fall from one of the stadium's three upper levels.

"Anybody hitting that would go over it," said John Fruin, a safety consultant in Massapequa, N.Y.

Johnson stressed the decision by the PFD and Mariners to raise the rail was motivated by a sense of comfort, not safety.

"I just think it's a comfort level," said Johnson. "In a lot of places, people are used to seeing rail levels that are higher."

On the Kingdome's third level, for example, the railing is slightly more than 33 inches tall.

The PFD plans to install a three-eighths-inch aircraft cable with fittings to keep it taut, as an extension over the top of the rail, said Johnson. The PFD won't have an estimated cost until its exact installation is figured out, but it is viewing it as an overrun that will have to be paid by the Mariners, Johnson said.

The original railing height of 26 inches is the same as railings at Benaroya Hall and Colorado's Coors Field, she said, and it met both the Uniform Building Code and the Seattle Building Code.

But Dennis Forsyth of NBBJ, the stadium architects, said the 4-inch extension is being made at the behest of a building inspector.

The inspector believed that a concrete curb the original railing is built upon could be used as a walking surface, particularly by children. Therefore, the original railing height was several inches too low, Forsyth said.

On most balconies, national building codes typically require that railings be 42 inches high, which is about the center of gravity for an adult male. In theory, if a grown man leans, falls or is thrown into a rail of that height, his center of gravity will be just low enough to keep him from going over the top.

National Bureau of Standards tests, conducted in the mid-1970s, found that a human-like dummy standing a little over 6 feet 2 inches consistently fell over a guard rail height of 36 inches at both slow and fast speeds.

But because railings can interfere with a view, the 42-inch standard is invoked only at the bottom of stairways in spectator venues such as stadiums and theaters. Jake Pauls, a Maryland-based building safety consultant who sits on the Life Safety Technical Committee of the National Fire Protection Association, tried to raise the 26-inch standard about five years ago, but the panel could not agree on how to deal with sight-line problems.

The PFD's solution, he said, is a weak compromise.

"It's a messy, messy problem," said Pauls, who quit consulting on stadiums out of frustration with safety concerns. "Raising the rail 4 inches doesn't give you much. You're still 12 inches below the minimum standard."

No one keeps statistics on how often people fall from stadium mezzanines, but with people reaching for foul balls and the exuberant crowds at games and concerts, accidents are bound to happen, Pauls said.

"It's my gut feeling that a facility has a likelihood of one serious fall in its lifetime," Pauls said.

In 1994, a Texas woman went over a 30-inch rail after an Opening Day game of the Texas Rangers at The Ballpark in Arlington. She fell 35 feet and suffered two broken ribs, a broken arm and broken neck bones.

The Rangers later raised the railings to 46 inches and became the first major-league baseball team to post warning signs on the rails.

But in other stadiums, designers find they have a hard time dealing with both the structural difficulties of raising rails and the facilities managers made miserable by angry fans.

"No matter what height you set it at, you're going to get some degree of complaints from the spectators," said Ed Roether of HOK Sports in Kansas City, Mo., the most active architectural firm in the nation's recent stadium boom.

"Either `It's too low and I don't feel safe,' or `It's too high and I can't see the field of play.' "

Railing cables can create problems because they have to be kept taut, putting pressure on their supporting structures, said Roether. And as designers add more supports, they can end up creating more obstructions.

HOK, which has designed Coors Field, Cleveland's Jacobs Field and Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards, has worked with higher, flat rails sloping toward the field, but sight lines on those can still be problematic, Roether said. The firm has even had facilities managers lower railings after fans complained.

Another solution, suggested in vain by Pauls, the Maryland-based safety consultant, is to tell spectators they "assume a large risk" in sitting near railings. The warning could be printed on tickets, much as warnings currently tell fans about the dangers of thrown bats and batted and thrown balls.

Overhead, meanwhile, construction crews continue to test Safeco Field's retractable roof. All three panels will be fully extended and retracted later this month. Adjustments have been made to the wheels that carry one of the roof panels, said Ken Johnsen, PFD executive director.

The tests remain on schedule, and the roof is expected to be fully functional before the first game, he said.

Seattle Times reporter Alex Fryer contributed to this report.